1. Technical Field
The present invention is directed to an improved data processing system. More specifically, the present invention is directed to an apparatus, system and method for automatically making operational selling decisions.
2. Description of Related Art
Traditionally, purchasers and sellers negotiate terms for the sale of products and services. The purchaser and seller come to an agreement that each feels is beneficial. A contract is established and the seller provides the product or service in exchange for consideration. Such exchanges occur thousands of times a day all over the world.
With businesses and companies, buying and selling are done on a much larger scale. Businesses and companies typically buy products and services in bulk based on the needs of the business or company. Such needs may be based on the operational goals of the company, for example.
Businesses have begun migrating to conducting commerce over data networks, such as the Internet. Such commerce typically involves a business offering its products and services for sale through web sites. A customer may access the business' web site using his/her computer and a web browser application. Once access is obtained, the customer may select products or services for purchase, fill in appropriate on-line forms, and provide billing and shipping information.
Such customers, however, are typically of the individual single sale type. That is, the customer is typically an individual and not a business. Moreover, the purchasing and selling arrangement is typically a nonnegotiable one. That is, the customer simply must accept the terms offered by the business if the customer wishes to make a purchase. Likewise, the business does not have any mechanism for adjusting the terms of sale of a product or service. In short, there is no mechanism for automatically making business decisions, such as purchasing or selling decisions, which may include negotiating the transaction.
Because the transaction is a nonnegotiable one, automation of the transaction is one-sided. That is, the vendor firms, i.e. sellers of products and services, provide an automatic mechanism for accepting orders but there is no automatic mechanism for the customer to purchase products and services. Similarly, there is no automatic mechanism for modifying the terms of sale of products and services to thereby negotiate a transaction with a customer.
Electronic marketplaces (e-Marketplaces) and other Business-to-Business transaction automation systems such as RosettaNet provide a degree of automation in placing and fulfillment of orders, both for buyers and for sellers. Typically, these systems require sellers to publish catalogs of goods for sale at predetermined prices. In addition to fixed catalogs, these systems are increasingly supporting online auctions as a means of setting prices dynamically. But they do not assist sellers in making tactical decisions on what goods to offer, how to price them, what bids to place, what terms of sale to accept, and so forth. All such decisions are made manually, by the sellers.
Similarly, purchasers using these systems are required to make all tactical decisions involved in making the purchase. The system's function is limited to assisting the purchaser in executing the actions triggered by his (manually entered) decisions.
Some auction systems, such as e-Bay and e-Snipe, provide consumers with “proxy bidder agents” that, in a trivial sense, automate certain aspects of the process of placing bids. In these systems, a buyer manually specifies certain runtime parameters of an “agent”, such as a bid increment or a time to place a bid. The “agent” then places bids according to a predetermined algorithm whose operation is completely determined by the consumer-specified parameter values and the current state of the auction. None of these systems permit the automated incorporation of historical or contextual information, such as information relating to previous transactions or to the overall activity in the market, into the calculation of the bid.
Thus, it would be beneficial to have an apparatus, system and method for automatically making purchasing and selling decisions in a data network, in which historical or contextual information are automatically incorporated into the decision-making process.